“No, what?”
“No bachelor apartment,” she said with a steely edge to her tone. “Robbie and I have a place over on Park Street. The two bedrooms may be small and a far cry from what you’re used to, but my boy has already lost one home. I’m not going to make him give up another. The only disruption he’s going to face is our move back to the farmhouse.”
“Okay. But if there are only two bedrooms, where the heck am I supposed to sleep?”
“The couch. You said yourself you have a lot of business trips planned. You’ll be out of town as much as you’re in it for the next few months.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have confided his plans to sell his restaurant in New York and open a new one in New Orleans. “Fine,” he told her, not really caring where they stayed. “The couch it is, then. You do intend to allow me a pillow?”
She ignored his sarcasm. “You’re headed the wrong way for my apartment,” she said, gesturing ahead. “You need to take the next right.”
When he drove past the street she’d suggested, she turned to face him with a huff. “Are you ignoring me?”
“Not at all. We’ll go to your apartment,” he told her with forced patience. “After we’re done talking to Ben.”
“No!”
Who was this woman? The Callie he remembered had been soft and pliable, more than delighted to go along with all of his suggestions. This more recent version couldn’t be more rigid, more combative and ready to fight him at every excuse. “That’s the whole purpose of this exercise, isn’t it?” he asked, not bothering to hide his exasperation. “Throwing the fait accompli in his face?”
“I meant not yet.” She softened her tone. “Robbie will be coming home soon, expecting me to be there. He’s going to be confused enough by the situation. He’ll need time to adjust before we subject him to anything more. I certainly don’t want him coping with any nonsense from Ben Parker.”
She said the words firmly, but Luke could hear the plea behind them. He turned to glance at her, unsettled to find her studying him. He’d forgotten how deeply that gaze of hers could probe, how it could wriggle all the way in to stir up his conscience. How could he object? was her obvious message. All she wanted was to protect her son.
A perfectly laudable objective. As long as the one she was protecting him from wasn’t himself, the boy’s rightful father.
She didn’t know—nor was he going to tell her just yet—about his little heart-to-heart with her ex-husband.
To say that Luke had been at loose ends that day was an understatement. Having been cut from the team, he’d learned how shallow and temporary his lifestyle in New York had been, how quickly he could lose so much more than a mere job. In what seemed like overnight, he’d gone from superstar to pariah, condemned by the media who once called him their darling, deserted by people he’d thought were friends. Going to New Orleans to lick his wounds, he’d plopped down on a bar stool planning to drown his sorrows. Trust Reb Jenkins to show up at his darkest moment.
Reb had heard all about Luke’s meteoric fall from grace. The media hadn’t been kind, and anybody who even casually followed sports knew the story, but Reb, who hung on to their boyhood rivalry the way old women cling to the family album, had savored the tale more than most.
“Maybe you got the scholarship and life in the big leagues,” he’d gloated, his whiskey-soaked voice slurring over the words, “but look where it got you.”
It was then that Luke learned how Callie had married him so soon after Luke left town. Two shots later and increasingly belligerent, Reb began to gripe about his marriage, how and when it had all gone sour. “A bun in the oven,” Reb had grumbled more to his shot glass than to anyone in the room. “Do the arithmetic, and it’s as clear as air someone got there before me.”
I am that someone, Luke had realized instantly. Even without doing the arithmetic, he knew Callie, knew she hadn’t been with anyone else.
Reb might have ranted on, but all Luke heard, thought or felt were the ramifications of Reb’s pronouncement. He had a kid out there, a kid who didn’t know he existed, an innocent left to believe his dad was this hopeless drunk on the bar stool beside him.
Filled with a rage he never could have imagined, he’d left the bar to roam the street for hours. All too well he could picture Callie’s face the day he’d left her. She must have known, even then. And still she’d said nothing.
The more he’d thought about it, the more it had fueled his anger. Knowing Callie, she probably felt she was protecting the kid. All well and good if she’d given him the chance to sink or swim, but she’d taken the decision right out of his hands. Now, none of them would ever know what Luke might have done with the knowledge. And the one who would suffer most for this was their innocent son.
So don’t talk to him about protecting Robbie.
He took a long moment to swallow his resentment, aware that he would do far more harm than good by giving vent to his anger at this particular moment. Taking the next right, he headed to her apartment, willing to give the inch if it eventually got him the mile. He was by nature the impatient sort, the kind who preferred to have things out in the open, but Callie was nothing if not stubborn, and she’d clung too long to her secret to give it up to the man she felt had abandoned her. Nothing would be gained by forcing her to tell the truth. She had to tell him of her own free will for there to be any real hope for the future.
“Fine, no visit to Ben today,” he told her, trying to keep his tone light. He didn’t really care about facing down his father, anyway. It was just an excuse, the only one he could think of to coax Callie into marrying him. Just for the record, she wasn’t the only one interested in protecting their boy.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” She was still staring at him, a slight frown creasing her face. “Our situation, that ceremony? I mean, Mr. Fry and those ladies seemed so tickled to death for us. But it was just a lie and we kept it going.”
It was one thing to cultivate patience, but he didn’t like being called a liar. “Our marriage is the means to an end,” he said curtly, unable to keep the irritation from his tone. “That’s all there is to it.”
“But it feels wrong to me. Play-acting about love is like…like we’re playing with fate. Gramps always said love was a gift that should never be taken lightly.”
“I thought you wanted a marriage of convenience. If we’re going to make it one of those arranged contracts, like between royal families, love needn’t enter into it at all.”
“I know. It’s just…” She frowned, as if she were groping for the right words and couldn’t quite find them. “I saw how it was with my grandparents…and my folks before they died. They meant everything to each other. Just watching them together made you smile, made you want to be like them. That’s what I want someday, Luke. Not this…this travesty we call a marriage.”
Barely an hour into married life and already she was looking for the exit?
Pulling to a stop in front of her apartment, he told himself it shouldn’t come as a surprise. In his experience it was always this way. Maybe others could find real and enduring emotion, but all his relationships inevitably flat-lined somewhere along the way. Sooner or later the woman admitted that what she’d thought was love actually
